


A Stove in the Back of the Room

by SinMachine420



Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Angst, Blood and Gore, Child Death, Child Murder, Graphic Description, Implied Relationships, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, Kidnapping, Lucio as a source of comfort??? what???, Murder, Pain, Violence, i wanted to flesh out Emjet more and thought i may as well post it, im sorry, its not the focus, just on the down low, lucio is only in the very end, not a ship fic but they still lovin in this one, not explicit but its there, not gonna lie this is really heavy, outside of canon, very lightly implied on that last one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-28 01:39:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17778161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SinMachine420/pseuds/SinMachine420
Summary: Emjet snaps after being faced with something much more horrible than she knows how to deal with.





	A Stove in the Back of the Room

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was mostly meant as a practice, as I'm very not used to angst, but after some prompting I rewrote it and here we are.
> 
> This is mostly influenced by Watchmen, the scene where Rorschach kills the child murderer, and the blood-bending episode of Avatar.
> 
> I'd say enjoy, but this is not very nice.

She’s going to be sick.

Never before in all her years with the mercenaries has Emjet seen something like _this_ , something so completely abhorrent and brutal and _evil_ . Her heart is pounding in her chest and her lungs feel so heavy as she takes in the scene in this fucking _damnable_ room.

The room is large and filthy, it’s walls carved out of the hard stone that serves as the foundation for Karnassos above her, a city that in this moment has never felt so far away. The stone is rough and jagged, iron chains are nailed into the stone at random intervals at varying heights, though none reaching higher than four feet off the ground. It’s terrible to think, but Emjet wishes none of those chains were empty. There are about half a dozen cots haphazardly arranged around the room, each one stained and torn. More chains are bolted into the ceiling above those small beds. The uneven floor was marred with blood, yet somehow this was not the worst thing in the room. The worst was that _stove_.

Carved into the back wall it sat gaping and black, it’s hollow charred and bloodied. It resembles an inhuman maw, swallowing light and any sort of pleasant emotion into its depths where they’re devoured. Despite everything around her she wants to believe that this blood is from animals, that this is some sick slaughterhouse for the pantry, fuck it, even wishes this was for animal sacrifices. This lie she tells herself can’t even stick for more than a moment upon discovering the stove was not altogether empty.

The floor of the stove is littered with blackened charcoal and old cinders, warm but not hot. It’s been a few hours since this was used last. A glint of white catches Emjet’s eye from the back of the stove, partially obscured by ash and debris. Her mind screams at her to _stop, go back outside_ as she leans into the awful stench of this pit to retrieve whatever it is because she needs to know, she already knows what happened here, but she needs to really _know_ or else she’ll forever feel like she never did enough, never truly got to the bottom of these disappearances.

On its own what she finds is innocuous, nothing sinister in its nature. And yet, charred black and _so very small_ this single pair of underwear means absolutely everything. Bile races up her throat and it takes everything in her not to vomit as she stumbles back out of the stove, unable to wrench her own fingers from the simple piece of cloth in her grip. Her eyes swim with tears of grief, rage, horror, and just fucking _rage_. She can’t tear her eyes away from the soft fabric, once so clean, once belonging to someone, now, now it’s just scrap, waste, like the girl who wore it-

“Hey!”

Emjet jerks her head to the side, locking her eyes on the man standing in the poorly disguised doorway, the light of a sane world shining behind him. He stood between her and sanity. His ruddy face was twisted in a frown, heavy brow creased and sweaty on a head too thick for his own neck. The fine silks he dressed in did nothing to disguise the pig wearing the clothes.

“What the hells do you think you’re doing in my damn house!?”

She turns to face him fully, nails tearing through the brittle cloth still held tight as she finds she can’t regard him with anything more than a snarl when his eyes sluggishly drop to the innocence she holds in shaking hands.

“Hey- hey now, let’s not get hasty. This isn’t what it looks like, it, it got dirty, too dirty to clean, so i just burned it up, I didn’t, I didn’t _do_ nothin,” the man speaks with a tremor of his own now, his chin quivering like the bastard might cry.

The drunk idiot realizes flat denial won’t work, considering where they stand, so he changes his tune, “l-listen I can explain, I, I had to, or, or, or, or, **fuck** , or this whole city woulda collapsed, we uh, we’re cursed, a-a-and-”

Emjet squeezes her eyes shut, trying to drown out the noise in her head, a noise like screaming that swims all around her, trying to figure out what to do. _What the hell do you do with a guy like this, what can you do_?

_What does he deserve?_

Her mind swims with questions and pain, anger and hate climbing higher and higher up her spine till she feels like it might rip through the top of her skull as her eyes dart between the smalls, the man, the chains, smalls, man, cots, chains, man, stove, smalls, man, blood, blood, _blood_ -

“Why do you even give a damn? I already paid you people. I just needed to get the people to stop breathing down my neck and the bandits were a good scapegoat. You people got what you care about, got your money. _They were only common kids, they didn’t matter-”_

He’s on his knees before he can blink, the speed of it all smashing his jaw over his own tongue and shattering his kneecaps as they strike the ground. At first he doesn’t seem to understand how he got from his feet to his knees without moving on his own and with the merc having not shifted from her place in the center of the dungeon. How and why becomes less relevant as he suddenly becomes very aware of the pain assaulting his senses and he screams, blood spilling out of his mouth along with his severed tongue.

From her spot in the center of the room Emjet glows. Her skin seems laced with thin threads of golden light, that same light pulsing from her eyes. With a single twitch of her finger the man kneeling before her twists, falling to the floor in a sickly satisfying display of pure agony as his very spine betrays him. He can only babble nonsensically and shriek his unintelligible curses as inside his body his blood begins to harden, crystallizing in his veins and slowly splitting skin not meant to contain so much solid mass. She looks in his eyes as all at once, before his heart fails him, his blood shoots from his flesh in every direction, tiny shards of viscera slicing through clothes and impaling themselves on the wall. She can only stare at him as his now bloodless corpse lies dead.

She doesn’t move, she can’t, not even as the sound of heeled footsteps hurries toward the hidden room. Even as Lucio pushes past the curtains Emjet can’t look away. He says something to her, his eyes rapidly taking everything around him in as he tries to pull her away from the scene. It’s not till she’s out of the room that she can hear him.

“-alright, you’re alright, he’s dead. There’s no way _anything_ could survive that, could survive you. You were right. No more kids are gonna be going missing any more-”

“We can’t tell them.”

He stops in his tracks, looking up at her with confusion and lingering disgust that neither of them could shake off, “What? Why not?”

Her voice is raw and haggard, as if she had been the one screaming. Maybe she was. “They can’t know what happened to their children. They can’t know it was right underneath their feet,” her hands continue to shake and it’s only now she realizes she’s not holding the underwear. She doesn’t miss it.

Lucio nods, pursing his lips as he looks off into nothing like he always done when thinking about something, “... I killed him. He didn’t give us fair pay after the bandit job, and then we found out he was a demon. The townspeople should be grateful. Nobody wants a demon mayor.”

It’s a poor explanation, but it’s not the truth, so it’ll do. Emjet almost smiles, and yet the smile doesn’t push past the thought of it, her face remains unchanging. After all the noise back in that room all that’s left is absolute silence in her head, almost louder than the screams. Every though she has shouts through the darkness like the beam of a lighthouse on a moonless night, quickly swallowed back up by the darkness. The thought that shines through now is a simple one. “I love you, Lucio.”

He coughs and his face goes bright red as he once again stops to stare up at her face. They may have been _together_ for a while now, but neither of them has said something akin to actual affection before now. But looking at her, he’s not sure she even realizes she said it. So instead of trying to think of any proper response, he holds her a little closer and the two leave the cold building.


End file.
